THQ Humble Bundle single-handedly resurrects THQ stock price

Hooray! Hooray for savings.

Whether you love or are weirded out by the THQ Humble Bundle (“love” is the correct emotion), there’s no deny that it’s making a lot of money for both THQ and charities.

In fact, it’s making so much money that it’s caused THQ’s stock price to jump by a staggering 40%, up from $1.07 to $1.60.

This new price has been lauded by observers here in the games.on.net offices as “less on-the-brink-of-death than before”, which is excellent as THQ’s ongoing financial woes have already forced massive layoffs both here in Australia and abroad, as well as the delay of multiple flagship titles.

See, the problem with THQ HB is that there not showing you how much is going where, so yeah, the bundle may have made that much, but how much is going to THQ? A lot of people are giving all the money to charity because THQ sacked a lot of people, but they would not have needed to do that if they where ok money wise, so its a catch 22…

last time I checked (and don’t hold me to these stats, been wrong before), at 3.2 mill, 2 mill was going to THQ simply because of how they’ve advertised them going out of business soon without revenue. From THQ’s perspective, this was a brilliant move in order to secure some more funds to keep working. Wouldn’t surprise me if other companies did these bundles to fund some “less safe” or unique/innovative games.

I wonder how much of the jump in stock price is purely due to the Humble Bundle sale. It’s really only a short term cash injection which could be seen as eroding the medium term revenue of the games included. Besides even at $2 – 3 million it’s not very much. Consider that their net sales for the last quarter were $107 million.

The jump in stock price to my mind is quite as likely a result of investors simply getting in while the price is low in order to turn a short term profit following the buy orders pushing the price up. I’d speculate this and their announced financing negotiations would influence investors more than a small sale.

Leave a comment

You can use the following bbCode[i], [b], [img], [quote], [url href="http://www.google.com/"]Google[/url]